


lullaby for the new world order

by 1000_directions



Series: luckyverse [10]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, One Direction (Band)
Genre: Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, Bad Puns, Good Puns?, M/M, Panic Attacks, wild speculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-22
Updated: 2018-09-22
Packaged: 2019-07-15 15:27:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16065992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1000_directions/pseuds/1000_directions
Summary: “What happened?” Bucky asks.“The war,” Louis says so softly that Bucky’s sure he must have imagined it. “Fuck, I’ve never talked about this with anyone before.”Lucky fought the infinity war, and the infinity war won.





	lullaby for the new world order

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nightwideopen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightwideopen/gifts).



> this was originally intended to be part of 'dust to dust,' but it didn't really flow with the rest of that story, so i cut it. however, i think it does some nice character work for the two of them, and it also explains how we got from infinity war to here, so i wanted to share it anyway.
> 
> please note that this contains MAJOR SPOILERS for infinity war, followed by some wild speculation and probably eventual canon divergence.
> 
> also please be aware that this story contains a fairly detailed description of a character experiencing a panic attack.
> 
> thank you to adri for looking over the first bones of this scene a while back. and thank you to everyone who reads this wacky little universe and believes in it anyway. i carry you all around inside the soulstone of my heart <3

Bucky really isn’t trying to eavesdrop. He is genuinely attempting to concentrate on his book and not listen to Louis pacing in the hallway while he has a private phone conversation with Briana. But Louis’ voice keeps getting louder and more frustrated, and Bucky has super-soldier hearing and a sizable but finite amount of self-control.

“He was supposed to be here at two, and it’s already half-three,” Louis is saying angrily, and his voice keeps rising like he’s trying to talk over someone else who’s speaking at the same time. “Just tell me when he’s going to be here.” There’s a brief pause, and then Louis is snapping, “I wouldn’t have to keep ringing if you would quit pulling this shit. You’re not allowed to-- Don’t act like you’re the only-- You can’t keep-- I’m trying my best, too.” There’s a longer pause, and Louis’ voice is much softer when he continues, so quiet that Bucky really has to strain to hear him repeat, “I’m trying my best, too, Bria.”

The two of them mostly get along, and they do an excellent job of hiding it from Freddie and making it seem like everything is fine and friendly and effortless. But they don’t always get along. Not always.

Louis’ eyes look a little wild and unfocused when he walks back into the den and sits down beside Bucky on the couch. He’s not quite as close as he’d normally sit, and his one foot is tapping so restlessly that it jostles his whole leg, and there’s a nervous sort of staticky energy radiating from him that tells Bucky not to get too close just yet.

“She makes me crazy,” Louis says after a time. “I like her, but sometimes she’s the worst. Can’t fathom how people do this when they genuinely can’t stand each other. This is hard enough; that must be impossible.”

“Did you work out a plan?” Bucky asks carefully.

“We did,” Louis says, and he moves incrementally closer until he’s curled up against Bucky’s side where he belongs. “Her nan’s in town, and they want to have a family meal and go to a film. They’ll keep him overnight and drop him off by ten tomorrow, and then we’ll have him until after lunch on Saturday instead of Friday.”

“That seems fair,” Bucky says, his arm instinctively curling around Louis’ shoulders and giving him a little squeeze.

“It does,” Louis says cagily. “I don’t mind giving her the time. Shit, she’s been plenty patient with me. I just wish she’d fuckin’ _ask_ instead of making me chase her down when she changes the plan without telling me.” He arches his back and then settles easily down into Bucky’s loose embrace. “Always thought I’d have loads and loads of kids, you know? Didn’t picture doing it this way, just the one split between two homes.”

“Did you ever think about giving it another try with her?” Bucky asks. He’s not jealous as he asks it, because anyone can see how incompatible the two of them are now. But there must have been something there once.

“We’d already broken it off by the time she found out she was pregnant,” Louis says thoughtfully. “Tried to give it another go, just to see if we could make something work for the lad, but it was hopeless.”

“How does that just disappear?” Bucky asks. “How can you love someone that much and have it vanish completely?”

“What are you on about?” Louis says, his head tilted to one side. “Briana and I had some good times, sure, but we were never in love.”

“But….” Bucky’s mind reels wildly as it tries to process this new information. “But the ex, the one you thought was your soulmate, the one you wrote the album about...that was Briana.”

Louis’ eyes widen as he slowly shakes his head. “It wasn’t, love. Shit, have we really not…? Shit, no. That wasn’t Briana.” Louis swallows hard, and a look passes through his eyes that Bucky doesn’t recognize, something wild and skittish and uncomfortable. “That was El.”

“Who’s El?” Bucky asks, trying to keep his voice even as he forces himself to accept that there was someone _else_ in Louis’ life before he was a part of it, someone previously unaccounted for that Louis loved and fucked and confided in and saw a future with, someone who was lurking there in Louis’ past all along with Bucky ever even realizing it.

Bucky is trying not to be jealous, but he _is_ jealous, and it’s starting to make him upset. But he tries to dampen it, because he’s starting to realize that Louis is also upset. His respiration rate is up, he’s breathing too fast and too loud, and his eyes are jumping from point to point, not focusing on anything, and he might be having a panic attack, _his_ _Louis_ might be having a panic attack, and anything that Bucky is feeling is secondary and unimportant until he knows that Louis is okay.

“Hey, Lou, I’ve got you,” Bucky murmurs, and he puts a hand on Louis’ cheek. Louis’ gaze clicks right to him, like Bucky hoped it would. “Breathe, babe. Just breathe with me, okay? In and out, nice and slow.”

Louis nods, and he tries to correct, but he’s clearly struggling. Bucky puts his right index finger on Louis’ radial pulse, and he verifies how fast his heart rate is, and he feels the irregular skipped beat and he knows how terrifying that is, the moment when the heart is supposed to pump but it doesn’t, the cells reaching for oxygen that hasn’t arrived yet, the choking feeling that starts in the chest and blankets everything with panic and terror. Bucky _knows_.

“I’ve got you,” Bucky says again. “Sit up straight for me, babe. You’re doing great. We’re just gonna sit here together and breathe until you feel better.”

“Bucky, am I dying?” Louis whispers, his eyes still frantically locked on Bucky’s. “It feels like I’m dying.”

“I would never let that happen,” Bucky says, his voice cracking slightly. “You’re having a panic attack. I know it’s scary, but you’re going to be okay. I promise. You know I would never let anything bad happen to you.”

“I know,” Louis says, but he still sounds uneasy. “My chest feels weird, Bucky. It feels tight.”

Bucky takes Louis’ hand in his own and places it on his own chest. He then places his hand on Louis’ chest.

“I’ve got your heart, and you’ve got mine,” Bucky says, and his own words sound far away, like he’s hearing them underwater, but Louis needs him, and he can do this. “Try to match me, okay? Three of yours to one of mine. Focus. We’re going to do this together.”

Louis nods, and then his brow furrows as he concentrates. They sit there quietly for twenty minutes, Bucky desperately trying to hold himself together so that he can hold Louis together, and their heartbeats anchor one another as they try to swing back into synch.

“Got it,” Louis says finally, sounding exhausted. “That was three for one. I think that was it, Bucky.”

“You did a good job,” Bucky says softly. “I’m proud of you, Lou. How are you feeling?”

“Like shit,” Louis admits. “Look, I know we need to talk about--”

“Not now,” Bucky says firmly. “Let’s just watch a dumb movie and not think about anything for a few hours. We can talk later, okay?”

“Okay,” Louis says. He picks up the remote and punches a few buttons, and then he crawls fully into Bucky’s lap, arms around his neck, cheek pressed to Bucky’s chest. He’s still trembling a little bit, but he calms when Bucky pulls him closer. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” Bucky says, and his whole body aches with how much he means it, how much every single atom of him loves this man and hurts when he hurts.

*

It’s days later before Louis brings it up again, when the memory of what it felt like to see Louis so afraid has finally started to fade. They’re both in bed, Louis fucking around on his phone and Bucky reading his book again. He’s working his way through a list of “One Hundred Books to Read Before You Die,” and right now he’s up to _The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay_ by Michael Chabon. It feels familiar and not familiar, and it makes Bucky extremely uncomfortable at times, but he wonders if maybe that’s what books are supposed to do.

When Bucky finishes the chapter he’s reading, he puts the book aside and presses a kiss to Louis’ temple.

“Think I’m gonna go to sleep, Lou. Stay up as long as you want, though, you’re not bothering me.”

Louis instantly puts his phone down and takes each of Bucky’s hands in his, squeezing gently.

“Would it be okay if we talked?” Louis asks, looking down. “If you’re up for it?”

“Of course,” Bucky says.

He squeezes Louis’ hands back, and as always, he remembers the first time Louis told Bucky he loved him, how he’d asked Bucky to squeeze his hand if he thought he could love him back someday, and he squeezes now like he did then, a promise to stay here and take care of Louis and feel every emotion he knows how to feel, even the ones he doesn’t have words for.

“Do you want lights on or lights off?” Bucky asks him.

“Lights off,” Louis says, and Bucky reaches across him to turn off the lamp. Bucky lies down as the room falls into blackness, and Louis instantly, easily curls into his body, his breath warm and soft against Bucky’s throat. They’ve had a lot of difficult conversations over these last few years, and they both know that some things are easier to confront in the dark.

“What did you want to talk about?” Bucky asks, slowly running his hand up and down along Louis’ side.

“We should talk about my ex and why the two of us broke up,” Louis says. His palm is resting on the seam where Bucky’s metal arm meets the rest of his body.

“We only have to talk about it if you’re ready,” Bucky says. “I don’t want you getting upset.”

“I promise I’m not going to freak out this time,” Louis says. “Honestly, that came out of nowhere. Guess I haven’t thought about it in a while, and it stirred up some old shit that I didn’t realize still bothered me.”

“You can tell me whatever you’re ready to tell me,” Bucky murmurs.

“We were together for years. Me and... Eleanor.” Louis’ voice wavers a little as he says her name. “I loved her, thought she was my soulmate, all of it. We broke up for a while, and that’s when I got with Briana, and then Freddie happened.”

Even this much is a lot for Bucky to process. All this time, he thought Louis and Briana were in love, had experienced a grand romance together that resulted in a child, before drifting apart for nebulous reasons. But there was another person entirely. Someone Louis loved so much, someone perfect and unknowable, a stark question mark in Bucky’s understanding of Louis’ past.

“I didn’t think El would ever want to be with me again after that,” Louis says. “Thought I’d ruined it with her for good, but she decided to give me another chance, eventually. And we got back together and had a few more good years. I moved back to England for a while. I really thought she was my forever.”

“What happened?” Bucky asks, swallowing down the jealousy that rises up in the back of his throat.

“The war,” Louis says so softly that Bucky’s sure he must have imagined it. “Fuck, I’ve never talked about this with anyone before.”

That’s common, Bucky knows. At the war’s climax, half of all the people in all the galaxies turned to dust and got transported to the soul world, and it affected every single person in one way or the other. It was devastation on a scale so massive that even all these years later, it’s impossible for Bucky to wrap his mind around.

Everyone was either spared or dusted. It affected absolutely _everyone_ , but no one talks about it now. The people who were dusted don’t remember the experience, and the people who were left behind don’t want to. The trauma of watching your loved ones turn to dust in your hands was reported to be some of the worst in recorded history. They all came back from the soul world, eventually, but the memory of that loss is still vivid for some people.

Bucky remembers it all, of course. His super-soldier super-memory is almost always a curse more than a blessing, and this is no exception.

“It changed me, Bucky,” Louis is saying. “It was the worst thing I ever went through, and she didn’t understand what it felt like, and we couldn’t get through it.”

“I heard that,” Bucky says gently, stroking his hand soothingly along Louis’ upper arm. “That it was bad for the people who were left behind.” Watching half of everyone they cared about disappear before their eyes. Sending out texts to faraway loved ones, waiting tensely to see if there was a reply or not. Planes falling from the sky as pilots blinked out of existence. Governments falling into disarray as half of all world leaders vanished. Bucky was long gone by then, the first to be transported to the soul world, so he didn’t see the fallout. But he heard it was cataclysmic.

“I heard it was bad for the people left behind, too,” Louis says carefully. “But I wasn’t one of them. I was gone.”

“How could it change you if you were gone?” Bucky wonders. No one who left felt anything. No one except--

“I remembered it,” Louis whispers, and Bucky feels the bile rise up in his throat, and he chokes it back down as he tightens his arm around Louis, like he can squeeze all those terrible memories out of Louis’ head all these years later. “I _remember_ it. It’s not clear, but it’s there, Bucky.”

“Did you ever tell anyone?” Bucky asks urgently. No one’s supposed to remember but Bucky, and he shudders at the thought of the tests he went through afterwards, the invasive brain scans and the acquisition of his memories against his will. Louis can’t go through that. He isn’t strong enough.

“I didn’t tell anyone,” Louis says. “I’ve never told anyone but you.”

“That’s good,” Bucky says in relief. He tightens his arms around Louis, holds him as close as he can get. “It’s good that you didn’t tell anyone. You can’t, babe, not ever.”

“Why?” Louis asks. “What could happen?”

“If they find out that you remember it,” Bucky says, “they might do to you what they did to me.”

“You remember, too?” Louis whispers.

“You know I can’t forget a damn thing,” Bucky says wryly. “Not even when I want to.”

“Oh, darling,” Louis says softly.

“It’s okay,” Bucky says. It wasn’t, not at all. “We’re not there anymore. And I was built to endure things like that. How did you get through it without losing your mind?” The consensus is that no one remembers it because no one could have handled it. The theory is they must have dissociated instantly because the enormity of it was too chaotic and traumatic for anyone’s mind to contain.

“I don’t know how,” Louis says. “It’s not a perfect memory. It’s just a feeling. I remember being alone for a long, long time. And eventually, I felt other people around me, but I couldn’t get to them or see them or hear them. I just knew they were there, and we were all lost together. And the way time moved there….”

“So slow,” Bucky says. “Each second stretched on for years. We were gone for a small amount of time here, but we spent a hundred lifetimes there.”

“Yes,” Louis says with a nod. “And I just couldn’t stop thinking about how long it had been since I’d seen Freddie. I was living in England at that point, and I hadn’t properly been back to see him in a few months, and I just obsessed over that thought for the whole time.”

For centuries, it must have felt like to Louis. Centuries to reflect on every bad or unscrupulous decision he’d ever made, with no one else there to defend him or show him an alternative viewpoint. Alone with his self-hatred for centuries. Yeah, that definitely would have changed him, and Bucky aches impotently with how badly he wants to go back in time and stop that from ever happening to Louis.

“When I came out of that place,” Louis says, his voice sure and even, “I was so much older than I was when I went in. Even though I looked exactly the same. I was different, Bucky, but everyone else was exactly the same. El was the same, and I was different, and we just...didn’t fit anymore. And she didn’t see that, and it made it even worse.”

Bucky doesn’t entirely remember coming out of it. They tell him that he was nearly catatonic, physically present but mentally still trapped in some far off prison. His mind recorded it all too perfectly, they suspected, and his brain reached capacity and couldn’t form new memories. He was caught in a loop, remembering the same endless nothingness over and over, going mad from it.

S.H.I.E.L.D. downloaded what they could, extracted the rest by force, and he doesn’t have a clear memory of that either but there’s a vague impression, an echo of past injustices done to him. He’s spent his whole life trying to assert his right to make his own choices and control his own body, and they took that from him as easily as everyone else had taken everything else every other time before.

When S.H.I.E.L.D. was done with him, when they’d taken every last bit of him that they could get their hands on, they sent him to Shuri. And like always, she fixed the broken parts of him that she could. She couldn’t fix everything, though. Not this last time. And so when Louis finally found him, Bucky was a lot more broken than he’d been just a year earlier.

“That shouldn’t have happened to you,” Bucky says eventually. “No one should have had to endure that.”

“ _You_ shouldn’t have had to endure that,” Louis says gently. “This world has asked so much of you. You’ve carried so much on your shoulders that I just get furious at the unfairness of it all sometimes.”

“I’d carry yours for you, too, if it meant you didn’t have to,” Bucky says, and Louis smiles sadly at him and tucks Bucky’s hair behind his ears. “I’d double mine so you didn’t have any.”

“I know, love,” Louis says. “I’d never ask you to do that. But I know you would, first chance you had.”

“I wonder what it means that we both remember,” Bucky says. “Wonder if it means anything.”

“How much do _you_ remember?” Louis asks curiously. “Do you remember me?”

“Don’t remember any other people,” Bucky says, shaking his head. “Just remember the endless emptiness of it. It was just...a void. And I kept filling it up with thoughts, and it was always hungry for more, and it was boring and agonizing at the same time.”

“Wonder if we met there and we just don’t recall,” Louis muses.

“Could be,” Bucky says.

“Maybe we were friends, back there in the soul world,” Louis says, and he’s getting a glint in his eyes that Bucky recognizes too well. “Maybe we were--”

“Don’t say it,” Bucky warns, but he knows he’s powerless to stop Louis when he gets like this.

“ _Soulmates_ ,” Louis says with a triumphant grin.

“You’re the worst,” Bucky grumbles, but he accepts Louis’ apologetic kiss anyway.

“I love you,” Louis says softly, thumbing at Bucky’s cheekbones. “I’m not entirely joking, love. Maybe you knew me there. Maybe we were supposed to find each other here.”

“I don’t know if I believe in that,” Bucky admits.

“I didn’t believe in gigantic purple space-knobs who could snap half of the population out of existence, but the world’s a funny place, innit?”

“I’m glad you found me,” Bucky says, and the words feel huge and sacred in his mouth.

“I’ll always find you,” Louis says seriously, bringing both of his hands to cradle Bucky’s face, and Bucky has to close his eyes against the intensity of Louis’ stare. He feels the soft pressure of Louis’ lips on each of his closed eyelids in turn, and he shudders at the unbearable gentleness.

“Thank you,” Bucky says hoarsely.

“I’ve got you,” Louis mumbles. “I’ve got you right here, love. I see you, and you’re never going to be lost again.”

And there’s no reason in the world for Bucky to believe that, but he does anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> always accepting prompts at [tumblr](http://1000-directions.tumblr.com/ask)


End file.
